[A note to the reader: the following essay was written in 1985; it was published in Philological Quarterly, 66
(1987), as "Orinda, Rosania, Lucasia et aliae: Towards a New Edition of the Works
of Katherine Philips," pp. 325-54. I have updated the texts by comparing the edition I used with the texts from the recent
edition of Katherine Philips's works by Patrick Thomas, which is based on manuscripts, but
follows the same politicized arrangement favored by Cotterell; whenever I quote any of Philips's
lines I cite Thomas's pagination; when there was a discrepancy between the orthography or
wording of Saintsbury and Thomas's texts, I have preferred Thomas's. I have added the poems
he found to my listing. I have also updated the endnotes and bibliography.

I put this essay on the Net to make the information and texts contained in it readily available. I also note that in Thomas's edition for Stump Cross Press, Thomas simply edited
the manuscript and followed the order we find in Cotterell. Thus his edition leaves Katherine
Philips's poetry with the same skewed emphasis and disorder that Saintsbury's reprint of
Cotterell left it. Thomas substitutes a much better text than Saintsbury's or Cotterell's; he
prefaces the texts with a description of the manuscripts and other
printed books where the poems may be found; he includes informative notes; but without a comprehensible order, the poetry remains opaque to a reader who is not impeccably versed in her life history. There are other contemporary arrangements which he could have followed; for example, one found in manuscript 775b in the National Library of Wales, and printed in Carol Barash's English Women's Poetry, 1649-1714 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 291-98. Speaking generally, in this manuscript the private autobiographical poems come first, with the moral poems coming in gradually. The political poems are sandwiched in before the very end where the moral/religious predominate over the personal/autobiographical poems.

I also reprint (Thomas does not) Katherine's translation of a pastoral "Golden Age" poem, "La Solitude" by
Antoine Girard Saint-Amant (1594-1661) as "Solitude".

Orinda, Rosania, Lucasia et aliae:
Towards a New Edition of the Works of
Katherine Philips

By Ellen Moody

Frontispiece portrait from Poems 1667

It is the purpose of this essay to propose a chronological (and illuminating) order for the
original poems of Katherine Fowler Philips (1631-1664), or, as she chose to call herself, Orinda,
This ordering will enable us better to understand Philips's poems, and I will use the
contexts suggested for the poems to discuss the personal meaning and aesthetic merit of them,
which have been obscured because we are even now [that is, in 1987 when the essay was
published] still reading a reprint of the posthumous 1667 edition.

Here, first is a brief history of the significant publications of all Orinda's work. In 1651 her
tribute to William Cartwright's "Stay, Prince of Phansie, stay, we are not fit," was prefixed to a
posthumous edition of Cartwright's plays and poems.1. "Friendship's Mystery,
To my dearest Lucasia" (Anne Lewis Owen, later Trevor, Lady Dungannon) appeared in Henry
Lawes's Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues (1655). The year 1663 saw two
editions of Philips's translation of Corneille, Pompey. A Tragedy. In 1664 a pirated
edition of seventy-four poems was printed; Katherine Philips anathematized this book and
succeeded in suppressing it. She died of smallpox in this year.

Three years later her friend, Sir Charles Cotterell, commemorated her in a book of 121
poems and two plays, which included her unfinished translation of Corneille's
Horace. He prefaced this book with several verse tributes to her, most of them by
well-known male poets of the period, and one by an unknown feminist, Philo-Philippa. Cotterell
indicated that Philips also left a large volume of "excellent discourses" and "familiar letters," but
he did not print these. In 1669 and again in 1678 a London printer, Herringman, reprinted the
Cotterell book, adding a fifth act to Horace by Sir John Denham. In 1710 Tonson
reprinted the 1669 edition, substituting Sir Charles Cotton's fifth act of Horace for
Denham's. Finally, in 1905 George Saintsbury reprinted the 1678 Herringman version of
Cotterell, but without the plays, in Volume One of Minor Poets of the Caroline
Period. This edition is readily available, and at this time, it is used as the basis of
Katherine Philips' canon in scholarly essays.2

Some of Katherine's letters and a few more "fugitive papers"3 can be added to
Cotterell. In 1697 four letters from Orinda to an unknown Berenice were printed in a
collection of familiar letters by various hands; and in 1705 and 1729 Bernard Lintot printed a
series of letters from Orinda to Poliarchus, as she liked to call Cotterell. Although both groups of
letters are generally accepted as authentic, they have been tampered with by polishing,
pruning, and, perhaps, sensationalizing.4. In 1911 in a book on William Temple's
sister, Martha, Lady Giffard, Julia Longe did print a genuine transcript of a letter by Katherine
Philips; it is to Dorothy Osborne Temple, and dated January 22, 1664.5

The fugitive papers also include three genuine, hitherto unknown poems. Thirty-five years
ago Paul Elmen published what he thought was an unknown poem of Orinda's and variations
from Saintsbury's texts that he had found in manuscripts in the National Library of Wales.
The poem, "Epitaph on Mr. John Lloyd," had been published in a now rare private printing of
some of Orinda's poems by Louise I. Guiney; but the variations add to our knowledge
of Philips's biography and technique. Elmen urged that "a new edition of the poems of Katherine
Philips is one of the pressing needs for seventeenth-century scholarship".6 The
"new" poems were all printed in 1977. Mary Mahl and Helene Koon found one in a Huntington
Library manuscript, "To Rosania and Lucasia, Articles of Friendship" (Rosania was Mrs. Mary
Aubrey Montagu, cousin to the biographer John Aubrey). Catherine Mambretti printed a
manuscript poem in the National Library of Wales, "To the Right Honorable Lady Mary
Boteler on her marriage to my Lord Cavendish October 1662" (Orinda later re-named her Lady
Mary Policrite). Using a first-line index of manuscripts in the Bodleian, Mambretti also attributed
to Katherine, and printed, "On the Coronation"; it is a companion poem to Philips's "On the Fair
Weather just at the Coronation."7

The significant scholarship which will enable us to annotate and re-order the Cotterell-Saintsbury text is as follows. Partly in reaction against Edmund Gosse's landmark essay in
1883, "The Matchless Orinda," fifty-five years ago now Philip Souers wrote his scholarly
biography of Katherine Philips. While Souers is in the main accurate, he fails to invalidate
Gosse's main thesis that in Wales and in London Orinda was a focus of a more or less stable
and identifiable group of male poets and female friends.8 Essays adding to the
above sources consist of Gosse'sbiography of Jeremy Taylor (1904); W. G. Hiscock's
location in 1939 of Francis Finch's letter to Lucasia on friendship; W. Roberts's publication of
William Temple's elegy "Upon the Death of Mrs. Catherine Philips" (1963); and Thomas Patrick's
discussion of her relationship with Henry Vaughan and Rowland Watkyns, a seventeenth-century
Welsh poet (1976).9. Finallys W. Roberts has convincingly dated Orinda's
translations from French poetry; catalogued her inclusion in volumes of poetical lives in the
eighteenth century (one of which, "cleverly derogatory," contributed directly to the decline of her
reputation and showed that Orinda's translation of Antoine-Girard de Saint-Amant's "La Solitude" could be read
throughout the eighteenth century in popular poetical miscellanies. Unhappily for her fame, but
typically as a woman, this beautiful and imaginative Englishing of a rural poem was published
anonymously.10

It is my contention that the Cotterell-Saintsbury book leaves any reader who does not
otherwise know Katherine Philips with a distorted and unfavorable impression of her. It is
obvious from the text that she never did make any move towards a professional or authorized
edition of her work. Many of them were written for a few chosen friends, and part of their
meaning therefore remains enigmatic. Moreover, her poems are not printed in any kind of
planned sequence. Their chronology is utterly jumbled; poems which clearly belong together --
because they are written to or about one person or group of friends, and if brought
together would illuminate one another -- are widely dispersed. Poems written in a favorite genre
of Orinda's, the moral verse essay, alternate with occasional and lyric poems, written during
very different periods in her life, in heterogeneous moods and places, and for differing motives.
A semblance of order is provided by Cotterell, but it is a semblance, nothing more, and it reflects
the attitudes and needs of Cotterell, which were not identical with those of Katherine Philips.

By 1667 Cotterell was the Master of Ceremonies at the court of Charles II, and a courtier
grown old and diplomatically wise in the service of many Stuarts. He had made his reputation in
letters through his translations.11 He presents us with an utterly conventional, a
socially impeccable, fervently pro-Stuart Orinda, who is also an unsurpassed translator of
contemporary French poetry. In the first twenty-two poems of Orinda's book, Cotterell's aim is
to display the cream of society and the arts honoring and honored by a female poet who is a
paragon of conventional womanhood. In his introduction to his friend -- which many readers
never really surmount or even get past -- we meet an artificial and sometimes
disingenuous and politic poet. We remember a long procession of highly conceited heroic
couplets in public celebration of the Stuarts. When we read these poems as a group, we should
realize it is Cotterell's group and Cotterell's way of reading Orinda's poetry, Cotterell's emphasis;
that at least three of these poems were written at his request; and that, of "To the Queen's
Majesty, on her late Sickness and Recovery" (misplaced in the volume, Saintsbury, No. 76, pp.
574-75), Orinda wrote apologetically to Poliarchus:

I Purposely neglected to answer yours of,
the second of November by last Post, hoping
that your Commands would inspire me with something worthy your
perusal; but I find upon trial, that I am grown so dull, so heavy;
and in a word, so good for nothing, that neither my Importunities, nor your
Intercessions, will prevail with the Muses
to be kind to me in any Attempt of the
nature you Prescribe. But because you
shall see how great a Power.all your desires
have over me, I an contented to expose my
self as you will find by the enclos'd
Copy of Verses.12

It is appropriate to note that a careful reader of these encomiastic Stuart poems will discover
many dissonant passages of lament, dejection, and pessimism. Katherine Philips writes elegies
on the deaths of Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and Elizabeth of Bohemia (Cotterell's
supporting patroness), where she locates their value for us in their histories of continual loss and
their indifference to Fortune and material reward (Saintsbury, Nos. 8 and 10, pp. 512-13, 514-15;
Thomas, Collected Works, I78-79; 81; since Thomas's numbers are those of
Saintsbury I do not repeat them). Two Poems do not fit into Cotterell's Restoration parade at all.
In "On the 3rd September 1651" and "Upon the double Murther of K. Charles in answer to a
libellous rime made by Vavasour Powell" (Saintsbury, Nos. 11 and 1, pp. 515 and 507, Thomas,
Collected Works, I:69-70; I:82), the first written in 1651, the second 1653, Katherine
wrote private poems for herself. Her meditation on the Stuart defeat at Worcester recalls James
Shirley's dirge, "The glories of our blood and state".13 It is a lament of the heart,
crying out that no-one can win anything valuable or permanent, in the material world: "Who'd
trust to Greatness now, whose food is ayre/Whose ruine sudden, and whose end despaire?" The
second is no party poem either. Katherine condemns both sides in sarcastic antithetical couplets
"Great Charles his double misery was this,/Unfaithfull friends, ignoble enemies." She composes
into a terse polished couplet the horrors of the religious war around her thus: "Christ will be King,
but I ne'er understood/His subjects built His Kingdom up with blood." She asks with sharp frank
sarcasm "What noble eye could see, (and careless passe)/The dying Lion kick'd by every ase?"
There is the quiet questions can Charles not have "A quiet crowne, nor yet a quiet
grave?/Tombes have been sanctuaryes."

Katherine Philips was apolitical. Although her husband, James Philips (Antenor), father,
mother, and all their kin were Cromwellians and/or puritans, she was an unswervable friend to
Royalists and to people of varying religious and political persuasions, admiring constancy
itself, loyalty above all. She fervently loved the Cavalier drama, the "splendour" of its poetry,
and thus she identified as a poet and as a woman (as a person alone, considered apart from her
husband and family) with the "old court tradition" and Caroline poetry;14 she never
ceases urging all her friends to find their content in "A chosen privacy . . . A willow that repulses
all the heat,/The beauteous quiet of a summer's day . . . nothing can be/In this World certain, but
uncertainty" ("La Grandeur d'esprit", also "A Resvery," Saintsbury, No. 60, p. 556). In a
characteristic, often-quoted poem, she wrote thus to her childhood friends Mary Aubrey Harvey,
later Lady Dering, whom she called Ardelia, of "A retir'd Friendship':

Come, my Ardelia, to this bowre,
Where kindly mingling Souls a while,
Let's innocently spend an houre,
And at all serious follys smile

Here is no quarrelling for Crowns,
Nor fear of changes in our fate;
No trembling at the Great ones frowns
Nor any slavery of state.

Here's no disguise, nor treachery
Nor any deep conceal'd design;
From blood and plots this place is free,
And calm as are those looks of thine.

Here let us sit and bless our Starres
Who did such happy quiet give,
As that remov'd from noise of warres.
In one another's hearts we live.

We should we entertain a feare?
Love cares not how the world is turn'd.
If crouds of dangers should appeare,
Yet friendship can be unconcern'd.

We weare about us such a charme,
No horrour can be our offence;
For misheif's self can doe no harme
To friendship and to innocence.

Let's mark how soone Apollo's beams
Command the flocks to quit their meat,
And not intreat the neighbour -- streams
To quench their thirst, but coole their heat.

In such a scorching Age as this,
Whoever would not seek a shade
Deserve their happiness to misse,
As having their own peace betray'd.

But we (of one another's mind
Assur'd,) the boistrous world disdain;
With quiet souls, and unconfin'd,
Enjoy what princes wish in vain. (Saintsbury, No. 22, p. 524; see also
Thomas, Collected Works, I:98).

Orinda lives for readers today in this kind of statement.

Cotterell ended Philips's original poems with what may have been Katherine's last verses,
written twelve days before her death, to Gilbert Sheldon. Archbishop of Canterbury. It is another
public complimentary poem to a man high in Stuart society. Then Cotterell printed Katherine's
then respected translations, the first of which, "La Solitude de St Amant," has the
French text on facing pages. The poem to the Archbishor is one of Philips's finest
panegyrics, matching in sincerity, grace and epigrammatic strength her elegy upon her mother's
third husband, Philip Skippon, the Parliamentary Major General (written 1660 and buried in this
Stuart book between two Lucasia poems). Her translations are very good, and have been read
as original self-reflexive poems.15 But we do end on the public mask
with which we began. After all, translations are finally someone else's work, an intervening
mirror through which a poet speaks to the world, a literary deflector, and Philips's translations
from Corneille intendedly leave an impression of massive impersonality.16

In 1667 this kind of anonymity was familiar. From the sixteenth through the seventeenth
centuries in England, translation was a customary useful way for literary women
successfully to disguise themselves while uttering their passionate thoughts in print and in
manuscript. And Orinda did have something to veil, at least a little. She obscured her poem
"On Mr. Francis Finch (the Excellent Palaemon)" because she did not quite want other friends
to see that she is deifying Finch for inventing their society of poetry and friendship for
hers:

'Twas he that rescu'd gasping Friendship when
The bell toll'd for her funerall with men
'Twas he that made Friends more then Lovers burn,
And then made Love to sacred friendship turn.
(Saintsbury, No. 52, P. 550,Thomas, Collected
Works, I:43-44)

Francis Finch had given Katherine's emotional friendships with Anne Lewis Owen Trevor
(Lucasia) and Mary Aubrey Montagu (Rosania) a poetic justification and disguised language by
reifying informal irregular gatherings of men and women friends into a neoplatonic English
salon;18 We can date Katherine's addiction to poetic names just around the time of
Finch's way of accounting for Katherine's intense emotional attachments to female friends.

The Cotterell-Saintsbury text displaces Orinda's poetic delineations of her romantic
friendships with women. These seventy-one poems include her finest and most numerous
poems; and these occur higgledy-piggledy in the volume from the twelfth through the
penultimate of the original poems. My re-ordering will restore the strongest passion driving
Orinda to write poetry to its central place in her canon.

The anthologized Orinda is a woman enraptured and enthralled by perfect poetic
sherpherdesses in a pastoral world.19 We repeatedly find her ecstatic and blissful,
caught up in a numinous vision of Eros.20 Here is our dreaming woman, Orinda,
absorbed by these idealized presences:

To My Excellent Lucasia, on our friendship. 17th July 1651

I did not live untill this time
Crown'd my felicity,
When I could say without a crime
I am not Thine, but Thee.
This Carkasse breath'd and walk'd and slept,
So that the world believ'd
There was a soule the motions kept;
But they were all deceiv'd.
For as a watch by art is wound
To motions such was mine:
But never had Orinda found
A Soule till she found thine;
Which now inspires, cures and supply's,
And guides my darken'd brest:
For thou art all that I can prize,
My Joy, my Life, my rest.
No Bridegroomes nor crown'd conqu'rour's mirth
To mine compar'd can be:
They have but pieces of this Earth
I've all the World in thee.
Then let our flames still light and shine
(And no bold feare controule)
As innocent as our designs
Immortall as our Soule. (Saintsbury, No. 36, p. 537; Thomas,
Collected Works, I:21-2)

However, equally characteristic of Orinda are poems of apology, discouragement,
humiliations, estrangements and despair. Due to the disorder of Philips's poems to a number of
women, these poems are not understood and hence their force and thought unrecognized. Only
the women whom Katherine Philips knew for a shorter times or met later in life, or demanded
less devotion from, remained faithful and receptive. These are the so-called "minor" women,
e.g., Pastora and Phillis, as yet unidentified, and Philoclea (Mrs M. Stedman); then we have
Ardelia (Mary Aubrey Harvey, Lady Dering), Celimena (Lady Elizabeth Boyle Tufton, Countess
of Thanet), and Valeria (Lady Anne Boyle Montague, later Lady Sandwich). Katherine's earlier
companions who became obsessions with her lapsed into embarrassment and perplexity, were
naturally unfaithful and at long last shifted to anger and studied coolness. Regina Collier was
given no poetic name as her and Katherine's period of deep camaraderie occurred in Katherine's
father's house, before the supposed regular poetic circle formed. Regina Collier, Mary Aubrey
Montagu (Rosania), and Anne Lewis Owen Trevor (Lucasia) all eventually rejected the exclusive
devotion and overt courtship Orinda, lavished on theme with an understandable desire for
independence and automony. They shut her out with husbands, new friendships, other interests.
In response, she nagged them with uncomfortable poems of restrained discord and at moments
near-derangement.

These revealing and forceful poems by Katherine Philips are ignored or
misunderstood.21 They include the impersonal songs of renunciation. Here a
disorientated poet filled with self-loathing articulates the sickness of erotic enthrallment. Thus,
for example, we find "Orinda" repudiating "raptures which are joys diseas'd":

Against Love

Hence, Cupid with your cheating Toies,
Your real Griefs, and painted Joies,
Your Pleasure which its elf destroies.
Love like men in Feavers burn and rave,
And only what will injure them do crave,
Men's weakness makes Love so severe,
They give him power by their fear,
And make Shackles which they wear.
Who to another does his heart submit,
Makes his own Idols and then worships it.
Him whose heart is all his own,
Peace and liberty does crown,
He apprehends no killing frown.
He feels no raptures, which are joies diseas'd,
And is not much transported, but still pleas'd
(Saintsbury, No. 96, pp. 587-88), Thomas, Collected
Works, I:214

There are poems of arguments of Donnian wit, emblematic poems in the metaphysical vein
in which Philips doubts her vision, finds no object worthy of it, inquires into human indifference.
In "The Enquiry", she asks:

Why is't it do difficult to see
Two bodyes and one minde?
And why are those who else agree
So differently kind?
Hathe nature such fantastique art,
That she can vary every heart?

Why are the bonds of friendhsip tyed
With so remisse a knot,
That by the most it is defyed,
And by the rest forgot?
Why do we step with so light sense
From friendship to indifference?

Two of Katherine Philips's finest poems are blistering excoriations of Regina Collier. When
during the period of the poetic society, Regina rejected Colonel John Jeffries (Philaster) as
a husband, Orinda prayed that time would destroy Regina's "beauties," leave this "Triumphant
Queen of scorne," a "forlorn" "cheape victim to another's scorne" make her feel "a wretched
Captive" to "fetters which you do upbraid" ("For Regina," [in Saintsbury: "on her Cruelty to
Philaster," Saintsbury, No. 39, pp. 539-40; Thomas, Collected Works, I:125). Earlier
when Regina's first husband and baby had died, and Regina left England for Antwerp (in hope of
another husband), Katherine labelled Regina "Unworthy" and cursed her for "betraying faith"
with Katherine herself. Katherine makes vivid to herself 'The horrid treachery of that face," and
hopes "the desperate game that thou dost play/At private ruines" will result, "undo" Regina's
plans, and make her "perceive" the nature of her "exchange" for what it is:

When thy Idolaters shall be
True to them selves, and false to thee,
Thou'lt see that in heart-merchandise,
Value, not number, makes the price."
(To the Queen of inconstancie, Regina,
in Antwerp," Saintsbury, No. 35, p. 537; Thomas, Collected
Works, I:120-21) 22

The scheme proposed is to place Philips's poems to her women friends first, to group them
by interlocutor, and then within each group, to arrange the poems chronologically. I place
second those of Katherine's poems written to people she felt most deeply about after her women
friends -- her family members -- in other words, the poems to her children, husband, and close
kin. If we arrange these chronologically, they form a sketchy autobiography which brings into
focus a real, central, and time-consuming aspect of Katherine Philips's life: her comradeship
with her husband and her devotion to his daughter, Francis Philips, to whom Katherine became
mother when she was seventeen.23

In such a group, Philips's enigmatically titled elegy to her step-daughter (Saintsbury, No. 30,
pp. 530-31; Thomas, Collected Works, I:109-11) has sufficient context for the first
time so that as we read we can know the lived experience behind her profound sense of
loss:

In memory of F. P. who dyed at Acton 24 May. 1660 -- 13th of her
age"

If I could ever write a lasting verse,
It should be laid, deare Sainte, upon thy herse.
But Sorrow is no muse, and doth confesse
That it least can what most it would expresse.
Yet, that I may some bounds to griefe allow,
I'le try if I can weepe in numbers now.
Ah beauteous blossom! too untimely dead!
Whither, ah whither is thy sweetness fled?
Where are the charmes that allwayes did arise
From the prevailing languadge [sic] of thine eyes?
Where is thy modest aire and lovely meen,
And all the wonders that in these were seen?
Alas! in vaine! In vaine on three I rave;
There is no pitty in the stupid grave . . .
Never, ah never let glad parents guesse
At one remove of future happinesse,
But reckon children 'mong those passing joys,
Which one hour gives, and the next hour destroyes.
Alas! we were secure of our content,
But find too late that it was onely lent,
To be a mirrour wherein we might see
How fraile we are, how innocent should be.
But if to thy blest soule my griefe appeares,
Forgive and pitty these injurious teares;
Impute them to affection's sad excesse,
Which will not yeild to nature's tendernesse,
Since 'twas through dearest tyes and highest trust
Continu'd from thy cradle to thy dust;
And so rewarded and confirm'd by thine,
(wo is me!) I thought thee too much mine.
But I'le resigne, and follow thee as fast
As my unhappy minutes will make hast.
Till when, the fresh remembrances of thee
Shall be my emblem of mortalitie.
For such a loss as thine, bright soule, is not
Ever to be repaired, or forgot.

Another deep and loving relationship with a woman, a young one, a daughter, is recorded
here. The closing lines recall or are modelled on Henry King's moving "Exequy. To His
Matchlesse never to be forgotten friend", his wife, one of many instances of Katherine's continual
close affinities to metaphysical/Cavalier poetry (see Helen Gardner, ed., The Metaphysical
Poets [New York: Penguin, 1972, pp. 112-13).

Readers would also be able to comprehend that the H. P. of one Ben Jonson-like epitaph is
the same dead newborn son, Hector Philips, of another poignant elegy (Saintsbury Nos. 88 and
101, pp. 582 and 590-91; Thomas, Collected Works, I:205, 220). The poems to her
step-daughter and baby son reveal that this seventeenth-century mother was not distant and
unaffectionate. She did not hold back affection from a child out of a sense it could die as Stone
and others have argued was true of most pre-eighteenth century and "age of sensibility"
parents:

EPITAPH. ON HECTOR PHILIPS. At St Sith's Church

What on Earth deserves our Trust?
Youth and Beauty both are dust.
Long we gathering are with pain
What one Moment calls again.
Seaven years Childless Marriage past,
A Son. A son is born at last;
So exacty limm'd and Fair,
Full of good Spirits, Meen, and Aire,
As a long life promised
Yet, in less than six weeks, dead.
Too promising, too great a Mind
In so small room to be confind's:
Therefore, fit in Heav'n to dwell.
He quickly broke the Prison shell.
So the Subtle Alchymist,
Can't with Heremes-seal resist
The Powerful Spirit's subtler flight,
But 'twill bid him long good night . . . 24

Read together, the poems to her family refute the popular image of Orinda as a callow
woman, mostly occupied with the superficies of neoplatonism. In the group of intimate
poems to her husband, we find her encouraging him against a persistent depression at his
political losses. She offers him her strength of mind:

To my Antenor, March 16. 1661/2

My dear Antenor now give o're,
For my sake talk of Graves no more;
Death is not in our power to gain,
And is both wish'd and fear'd in vain
Let's be as angry as wee will,
Grief sooner may distract then kill,
And the unhappy often prove
Death is as coy a thing as Love.
Those whose own sword their death did give,
Afraid were or asham'd to Live;
And by an act so desperate,
Did poorly run away from fate;
'Tis braver much t'out-ride the storm,
Endure its rages and shun his harm;
Affliction nobly undergone,
More Greatness shews than having none.
But yet the Wheel in turning round,
At last may lift us from the ground,
And when our Fortune's most severe,
The less we have, the less we fear.
And why should we that grief permit,
Which can nor mend nor shorten it?
Let's wait for a succeeding good,
Woes have their Ebb as well as flood:
And since Parliament have rescu'd you,
Believe that Providence will do so too. (Saintsbury, No. 99, p. 589, Thomas,
Collected Works, I:218-19)

If we were reading Orinda's poems to Antenor as a group, one would not have to assert that
Katherine Philips was a serious companion to her husband, and that she was much more steadily
involved in the political realities of her time than any reified poetical salon. But the reader now
and still in Thomas's edition must wait until the end of a scattered disordered series of poems to
get to this one, to her poems to her children and must turn to political history of the period to
understand that last line. It's also worth pointing out that Katherine understands one of the
central motives of many suicides: shame. The individual is caught between choices, none of
which are felt bearable, all of which must be taken up before a private and wider public. She is
not usually spoken of as a woman with this kind of understanding.

My third grouping will not, because it cannot, be arranged by means of dates. It is comprised
of Katherine's self-communings in her non-occasional poems which have no interlocutor. This
group includes the impersonal songs of renunciation (discussed above) and the moral
verse essays, all sadly neglected today but in my view among her most interesting. They
strongly influenced Anne Finch in six of
her more moving poems from her younger life which were printed anonymously because
they are so similarly candid ( see 1696 Nahum Tate, Miscellanea Sacra). Philips's poems are not autobiographical in the same concrete
way, but they are inward-turning towers of verse in which she meditates serious philosophical
issues which she sees as impinging importantly on her life as a private soul. To read these as a
group also will make clear that Katherine was sincere (or at least consistent) in her conscious
dislike of the public marketplace and state politics.25

I would order these poems partly by their internal references to the civil war, the
commonwealth, or Restoration, but I would also rely on Souers' stylistic analysis. He traces
Philips's poetic modulation from a Cavalier or conceited, self-questioning, lingering,
décousu couplet art to an Augustan mode. In her later non-occasional poems, her
couplets are "pile[d) one upon another in a strong accumulative effect" in an "attempt" to create a
"verse tower."26 For example, "The World" is a post-Restoration verse essay;
despite the occasional reminiscence of Donne and metaphysical imagery, it is a series of closely
packed, intensive sceptical aphorisms whose underlying bleakness oddly anticipates Dryden and
Johnson's "Vanity of Human Wishes", Pope's psychological scepticism (as well as looking back
to Montaigne), Philips writes:

Wee falsely think it due unto our friends,
That we should grieve for their too early ends:
He that surveys the world with serious eys,
And stripps Her from her grosse and weak disguise,
Shall find 'tis injury to mourn their fate;
He only dy's untimely who dy's Late.
For if 'twere told to children in the womb,
To what a stage of mischief they must come
Could they foresee with how much toile and sweat
Men court that Guilded nothing, being Great;
What paines they take not to be what they seem,
Rating their blisse by others false esteem,
And sacrificing their content, to be
Guilty of grave and serious Vanity;
How each condition hath its proper Thorns,
And what one man admires, another Scorns;
How frequently their happiness they misse,
And so farre from agreeing what it is,
That the same Person we can hardly find,
Who is an houre together in a mind;
Sure they would beg a period of their breath,
And what we call their birth would count their Death.
Mankind is mad; for none can live alone
Because their joys stand by comparison:
And yet they quarrell at Society,
And strive to kill they know not whom, nor why,
We all live by mistake, delight in Dreames,
Lost to ourselves, and dwelling in extreames;
Rejecting what we have, though ne're so good,
And prizing what we never understood.
compar'd to our boystrous inconstancy
Tempests are calme, and discords harmony.
Hence we reverse the world, and yet do find
The God that made can hardly please our mind.
We live by chance, and slip into Events;
Have all of Beasts except their Innocence.
The soule, which no man's pow'r can reach, a thing
That makes each women Man, each man a King.
Doth so much loose, and from its height so fall,
That some content to have no Soule at all.
"Tis either not observ'd, or at the best
By passion fought withall, by sin deprest.
Freedome of will (god's image) is forgot;
And if we know it, we improve it not.
Our thoughts, thou nothing can be more our own,
Are still unguided, verry seldom known.
Time 'scapes our hands as water in a Sieve,
We come to dy ere we begin to Live.
Truth, the most suitable and noble Prize,
Food of our spirits, yet neglected ly's.
Errours and shaddows ar our choice, and we
Ow our perdition to our Own decree.
If we search Truth, we make it more obscure;
And when it shines, we can't the Light endure;
For most men who plod on, and eat, and drink,
Have nothing less their business then to think;
And those few that enquire, how small a share
Of Truth they fine! how dark their notions are!
That serious evenness that calmes the Brest,
And in a Tempest can bestow a rest,
We either not attempt, or elce [sic] decline,
By every triffle snatch'd from our design.
(Others he must in his deceits involve,
Who is not true unto his own resolve.)
We govern not our selves, but loose the reins,
Courting our bondage to a thousand chains;
And with as man slaverys content,
As there are Tyrants ready to Torment,
We live upon a Rack, extended still
To one extreme, or both, but always ill.
For since our fortune is not understood,
We suffer less from bad then from the good.
The sting is better drest and longer lasts,
As surfeits are more dangerous than fasts.
And to compleat the misery to us,
We see extreames are still contiguous.
And as we run so fast from what we hate,
Like Squibs on ropes, to know no middle state;
So (outward storms strengthen'd by us) we find
Our fortune as disordred as our mind.
But that's excus'd by this, it doth its part;
A treacherous world befits a treacherous heart.
All ill's our own; the outward storms we loath
Receive from us their birth, or sting, or both;
And that our Vanity be past a doubt,
'Tis one new vanity to find it out.
Happy are they to whom god gives a Grave,
And from themselves as from his wrath doeth save.
'Tis good not to be born; but if we must,
The next good is, soone to return to Dust:
When th'uncag'd soule, fled to Eternity,
Shall rest and live, and sing, and love, and See.
Here we but crawle and grope, and play and cry;
Are first our own, then others Enemy:
But there shall be defac'd both stain and score,
For time, and Death, and sin shall be no more.
(Saintsbury, No. 72 pp. 569-71;Thomas, Collected
Works, I:182-85.)

Readers of women's poetry are still unaware that the above sort of poem was as much in
Anne Finch's mind when she called herself a disciple of Orinda as Orinda's short lyrics of
friendship. "A treacherous world befits a treacherous heart" seem to this reader a peculiarly
female or feminine version of the heroic couplet -- it has the kind of difference from male
sentences Virginia Woolf talked of in her A Room of One's Own. As a reader I find
these towers of verses and the long meditations in Dryden-like stanzasDryden-like (inflected by a feminine tone and rhythm) peculiarly satisfying:

How vaine a thing is man, whose noblest part,
That soule which through the world doth rome
Traverses heav'n, finds our the depths of art,
Yet is so ignorant at home!

In every brook or mirrour we can find
Reflections of our face to be;
But a true optique to present our mind
We hardly get, and darkly see.

Yet in the search after our selves we run,
Actions and causes we survey;
And when the weary chase is almost done,
From our own quest we slip away (from "The Soule", Saintsbury, No 73, pp. 571-73,
Thomas, Collected Works, I:185-88)

My suggestions for a fourth and fifth grouping for an adequate arrangement in an edition of
Philips's poems would group those poems which share "a tone of distant formality."
27 The fourth group would be comprised of Philips's poems to her men friends.
They form a distinct group because in them she equates her interlocutor with a
coherent cluster of ideals and uses the individual man as an imagined figure around whom she
can meditate these ideals. Since in six of the ten poems, it is an aesthetic ideology which she is
intent upon, her poetic doctrine emerges. Read chronologically, we can map an
individual instance of the profound change in taste which occurred in England from around 1640
to 1660.

Again a kind of excellence in Orinda's works which is rarely anthologized28 will
emerge. A strong strain of antifeminism is discernible in editors' dismissal (in effect) of Orinda
as solely a sentimental lover of women, or (by some) more pejoratively, a curious example of
unconscious lesbianism.29 Antifeminism is also responsible for the reluctance of
scholars to admit that Mrs. Philips was friends with, and respected by Henry Vaughan, Henry
Lawes, Abraham Cowley, and Jeremy Taylor and other men of letters, not to omit men of wealth
and power like James Butlers Duke of Ormonde. The evidence is thick on the ground in many
books. In his introduction to Philips's poetry, Cotterell wanted us to grasp that this startling truth
was incontrovertible. In their tributes to her, Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, and Wentworth Dillon,
Earl of Roscommon insist on her unusual fame and the irresistible high quality of her work
(Saintsbury, Commendatory Poems pp. 493-95) .30 Katherine was not by her
generation relegated to a corner where women write poetry to one another.

Katherine Fowler Philips was matchless in the seventeenth century. She was a woman of
learning, idealism, and solid accomplishments during a time when most women were illiterate,
and (self-)educated women are in the situation of Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of
Newcastlep who knew no languages beyond English and whose schooling had (tragically for
her) not included any mental discipline because what she would write was assumed would never
be taken seriously.31 The matchless excellence of Philips's poems to say, William
Cartwright or Henry Vaughan is built upon just such mental discipline as then all but a handful of
women lacked. In "To Mr. Vaughan, Silurist on his Poems" she has understood that a pastoral
landscape and metaphysical rigour are central to Vaughan's religious poetry:

Had I ador'd the multitude, and thence
Got an antipathy to wit and sence,
And hug'd that fate, in hope the world would grant
'Twas good -- affection to be ignorant;
Yet the least ray of thy bright fancy seen
I had converted, or excuseless been:
For each birth of thy muse to after-times
Shall expatiate for all this age's crimes.
First shines the Armoret, twice crown'd by thee,
Once by they Love, next by Poetry;
Where thou the best of Unions dost dispence:
Truth cloth'd in wit, and Love in innocence.
So that the muddyest Lovers may learn here,
No fountains can be sweet that are not clear.
Then Juvenall reviv'd by thee declares
How flat man's Joys are, and how mean his cares;
And generously upbraids the world that they
Should such a value for their ruine pay.
But when thy sacred muse diverts her quill,
The Lantskip to design of Zion-Hill;32
As nothing else was worthy her or thee,
So we admire almost t'Idolatry.
What savage brest would not be rapt to find
Such Jewells insuch Cabinets enshrind'?
Thou (fill'd with joys too great to see or count)
Descend'st from thence like Moses from the
Mount,
And with a candid, yet unquestioned aw,
Restorlst the Golden Age when Verse was Law.
Instructing us, thou so secur'st thy fame,
That nothing can distrub it but my name;
Nay I have hoped that standing so near thine
'Twill lose its drosse, and by degrees refine ...
"Live, till the disabused world consent
All truths of use, or strength, or ornament,
Are with such harmony by thee displaid,
As the whole world was first by number made
And from the charming rigour thy Muse brings
Learn there's no pleasure but in serious things" (Saintsbury, No. 21, p. 523;
Thomas, Collected Works, 96-7.

Again, the note that "there's no pleasure but in serious things" is one as characteristic of
Katherine Philips in the deepest sense as her famous poems of ecstatic friendship to Lucasia.
She was highly learned in the philosophy and history of her period as well as supremely well-
read. This too is as yet overoverlooked.

The fifth, final and last grouping of Philips's poems should include the conventionalized and
politicized Stuart poems discussed above, poems with which Cotterell opened his volume,
Saintsbury his reprint of Cotterell, and with which Thomas has decided to open his as well.

If we read the poems of Katherine Philips in the order proposed they make sense, and reveal
an interesting appealing woman who was an able poet in her time. Equally to the point, a
reading of the poems in an appropriate order would do much to end the use contemporary
feminist scholars have been inclined to make of Philips as a whipping "girl." In the writing of
many she is still a modest politic paragon who with a conventional group of exemplary poems
gave later women a stultifying model. It is implied that she was a hypocrite to
boot.33. It did not seem so to Anne Finch.

Katherine Philips was an atypical, highly learned woman whose intense attachments to other
women led her into writing a group of extraordinary poems. We might here ask why this
attachment? We can only surmize that forced into marriage with a man so much older than she,
one who did not share her interests in learning, brought up in a world which insisted in the sacred
importance of female chastity, she turned to other women with whom as a person she felt safe,
comfortable and could find a deep validation of her sense of individual self. She knew she was
an anomaly. She knew other people did not have this need for sincere intense companionship
so she took over for herself the poetic idealized world of friends that others like to play with. She
took seriously what was for others a game. With these idealisations and her love for her family
and her imagination she dwelt in private communings as she wrote. She never marketed any
public image of herself at all, and, if we blame her for this, we are anachronistic. We demand of
her what we don't demand of ourselves: a breaking away from contemporary conventions.
Orinda would call us worldly fools.

It is again suggested that "a new edition of the poems of Katherine Philips is one of the
pressing needs for seventeenth-century scholarship." It is also suggested that such an edition
should re-order the poems so as to do justice to Katherine Philips at last.

A Proposed ordering of the Original Poems of Katherine Philips (with conjectural
dates and commentary) for a new Edition of her Works.

Note added in 2002: the reader
may use these explications and information if he or she has Thomas's edition, for Thomas has
used the same misorder and numbering that we find in Saintsbury. I have corrected the titles I
found in Saintsbury in accordance with Thomas's edition; I have added to Saintsbury all poems
hitherto scattered in recent publications (see above).

1. No. 26, pp. 526-27. "To the truly noble, and obleiging Mrs: Anne
Owen (on my first approaches)" ca. 1650. Very early in relationship; Katherine has not given
Anne the idealizing name. Subdued formal address; much self-disparagement and gratitude:
"There is no honor got in gaining me."

2. No. 25, P. 526. "To the excellent Mrs. A. O. upon her receiving the Name of Lucasia,
and adoption into our Society, 26 Decemb, 1651." Influenced by Donne's visionary lyrics;
ecstacy; they are numinous and absorb all good into themselves.

7. No. 28, pp. 528-29. "Wiston Vault." ca. 1652-54. Emblematic idea in poem of smooth
couplets. Reverie upon burial place of Katherine's husband's forebears in Cardigan. Lines show
it to be another to Lucasia: "after death too, I would be alive,/And shall, if my Lucasia doe,
survive.

12. No. 80, p. 577. "A Dialogue betwixt Lucasia and Rosania, imitating that of gentle
Thyrsis." ca. later 1650s. Companion poem to above; another antiphonal song of simple words
and lyric grace. Thyrsis is Henry Lawes. Rosania argues Lucasia must leave flocks and come to
town. Lucasia fears her "world" would be "severe/Should I leave them to go thither."

13. Mahl and Koon, "To Rosania and Lucasia, Articles of Priendship."36 ca.
later 1650s. Influence of Cartwright and poetic friends' playful rituals and
discussions.37 Orinda is asking her two friends to be real friends
with one anothert "vote down" "Estrangements/And all Punctilios of the town." Thomas lists this
poem as of doubtful authenticity, Collected Works, I:254.

14. No. 112, pp. 596-97. "Parting with a Friend." ca. later 1650s. After above poem;
triumvirate has had "forty weeks' converse." Again Orinda urges two women to be true, this time
by "Letters as kind and undisguised as thought."

15. No. 57, pp. 552-53. "Friendship." ca. later 1650s. Initiates series of discourses on
friendship to her "true friend." In March 1654 Finch sent his letter on friendship to Lucasia; the
"society" now engaged seriously with ethics of friendship.38 Orinda's style changing; verses smooth, simple, intendedly sweets recalling Waller, e.g., the friends are "As
saints in visions; quiet as the night,/But cleare and open as the summer's light." Very pleasing
poem.

17. No. 97, p. 588. "A Dialogue of Friendship multiplyed." ca. later 1650s.
Musidorus not identified. Katherine may be alluding to Philip Sidney's Arcadia;
Musidorus is one the two heroes. Orinda justifies her exclusive love for Lucasia.

18. No. 92, pp. 584-85. "To my dearest friend [Mrs. A. Owen], upon her greatest loss, which
she suffer'd the 27th Decemb: 1655. The death of Lucasia's husband, John Owen
(Charistus). Elegy in the form of verse character of Charistus, a strong French
influence.39

19. No. 32, pp. 533-35. "To (the truly competent Judge of Honour), Lucasia, upon a
scandalous Libel made by J.Jones." 1655. Colonel John Jones, regicide slandered Orinda
for her familiarity with Royalists. Defines honor; a visionary retreat to private world.

20. No. 59, pp. 554-56. "To my Lucasia, in defence of declared friendship" ca. 1656-59.
Relationship between two women changed after the death of Anne Owen's husband.
Another discourse upon friendship, but now a plea, a self-vindication, resisting Lucasia's
opinion that Orinda's overt reiterated courting of her is"impertinent." Lucasia
accused Orinda of "distrust"; Orinda asks Lucasia her to be kind.

22. No. 43, p. 54.. "To my Lucasia," ca. 1656-59. A desperate apology for her need for
outward signs of their friendship; asks Lucasia not to "quit" here, to "add some patience" to her
many virtues.

23. No. 98, pp. 588-89. "Rosania to Lucasia on her Letter." ca. 1656-59.
Orinda uses Rosania to accuse Lucasia of "rigid policy" in her letters. She hints that Lucasia is
really contemptuous of neoplatonism.

24. No. 108, p. 594. "An Answer to another persuading a Lady to Marriage" ca. 1660.
Forceful apostrophe to Marcus Trevor ("bold youth") then wooing Lucasia (who appears as
Calanthe in the letters between Poliarchus and Orinda). This was a period of bitter discord;
Orinda wants Lucasia to marry Cotterell and in this poem insults the relatively unpretentious
Trevor.40 Lucasia is "a public Deity" and Trevor's courtship of her is a
sacrilegel: "were't not very odd/She should depose herself to be/A petty household god." Other
poems suggest that Anne Owen (Lucasia) became indignant at Katherine's interference.

26. No. 113, pp. 597-98, "To my dearest Friend, upon her shunning Grandeur.' 1661.
Octosyllabic smooth couplets convoluted apostrophe in which Orinda urges Lucasia
to embrace "titles" to show that they will not corrupt her. This is a veiled attempt to persuade
Lucasia-Calanthe to marry Poliarchus (Cotterell).

27. No. 93, pp. 586-87. "Orinda to Lucasia parting, October 1661.
at London. " Another strikingly unreserved powerful poem; similar to "Injuria amici"
(see No. A.10 above). The difference is that this time Orinda blames herself.41

28. No. 106, pp. 593-94, "Orinda to Lucasia." ca. 1661-62. Two-stanza Pindaric ode of
anapestic couplets of varying lengths, which produce mournful cadence; metaphors drawn from
symbolic landscape of night darkness and a "crying heart" ("thy dawning it seeks").
Touching and sad poem on the death of their love. In this updating I include the text as it is not
well known:

Observe the weary birds e're night be done,
How they would fain call up the tardy Sun
With Feathers hung with dew,
And trembling voices too.
Thy court their glorious Planet to appear,
That they may find recuits of spirits there.
The drooping Flowers hang their heads,
And languish down into their beds:
While Brooks more bold and fierce than they,
Wanting those beams, from whence
All things drink influence,
Openly murmur, and demand the day.

Thou, my Lucasia, are far more to me,
Than he to all the under-world can be;
From thee I've heat and light,
Thy absence makes my night.
But ah! my Friends, it now grows very long,
The sadness weighty, and the darkness strong:
My tears (its dew) dwell on my cheeks,
And still my heart thy dawning seeks,
And to thee mournfully it cries,
That if too long I wait,
Ev'n thou may'st come to late,
And not restore my life but close my eyes (Thomas, Collected
Works,

29. No. 79, p. 577. "Song. To the Tune of Sommes nous pas trop heureux." ca.
1661-62. Companion piece to above. Orinda refers to "dying" from love's "quiver" and to "the
sad unusual story/How my wretched heart was torn." She expresses the confusion she feels
upon the shattering of her vision of Lucasia.

31. No. 100, pp. 589-90. "A Triton to Lucasia going to Sea, shortly after the Queen's arrival."
May-June 1662. Four-stanza Pindaric ode of basically dactyllic couplets of varying length; this
poem compares interestingly with "A sea voyage from Tenby to Bristol, 5 of September 1652,
Sent [from Bristol] to Lucasia" (No. B.3 above). Both humorous, gracious compliments to
Lucasia, the earlier in the conceited Cavalier style, the later in the broader metaphoric prosaic
style of Cowley.

32. No. 83, P. 579. "Lucasia, Rosania and Orinda, parting at a Fountain, July 1663."
One of Orinda's best poems; Katherine's use of myth recalls Marvel; her versification, Waller.
Her two (now cold) friends are like the fountain nymphs; she brings wine to revive them and the
spring. Great sadness -- it is harder to forget than to meet, hard as it is to meet. Another
anthology favorite.

B(l). Poems to Lucasia's family

1. No. 62, pp. 559-561, "In Memory of the most justly Honoured, Mrs.
Owen of Orielton." Mother of Lucasia's father-in-law and step-father has died February 1653.
A verse character in the idealizing later 17th centuryFrench tradition; Orinda advises Lucasia not
to grieve but pxofit by ideal example.

2. Elmen, "Epitaph on Mr John Lloyd," July 1656.43. Thomas, Collected
Works, I:248, prints this as "Epitaph on Mr John Lloyd of Kilrhewy in Penbrokeshire (who
dy'd July the 11th 1657), inscrib'd on his Monument in Kilgarron (in the person of his wife).
Eulogy on one of Lucasia's relatives (Lucasia's mother was Katherine Lloyd),44.

3. No. 31, pp. 531-33. "In memory of that excellent Person Mrs. Mary Lloyd of Bodidrist in
Denbighshire, who dy'd the 13th of November, soon after she came thither from Penbrokeshire."
Lucasia's maternal grandmother; another idealized verse character, this one intended to give
Lucasia "a Queen" of virtue in her heritage.

4. No. 105, pp. 592-93. "On the Death of the truly honourable Sir Walter Lloyd Knight."
1660-1661. Elegy in the form of an idealized verse character; Sir Walter is praised for his
"loyalty" to "arts and Virtues" and to the Stuarts during dangerous civil war.

C. Poems to Regina - Regina Collier. Regina was the wife of Katherine.
Philips's father's servant and cousin, John Collier; there are no poems from the period of
their romantic young-girl companionship extant before 1647.

1. No. 41, p 54. "Philoclea's parting. Feb: 25, 1650". The 1664 also dated
the poem. This is a brief series of coquettish couplets. Rosani'ls "silence" had made Orinda the
"wretched'st martyr". Now Philoclea has comforted Orinda, but only to increase
her "torment" by also parting.

F. Poem to Lady Alice Egerton Vaughan, Countess of Carbery. In the extant
corpus Katherine doesn't give this woman a poetic name. She was second wife to Richard
Vaughan, Lord Carbery, a powerful Cardigan royalist, patron of Jeremy Taylor; Lady Alice has a
tiny fame among Milton and 17th century poetry and masque specialists as it was she who
played the "Lady" in Milton's Comus.

1. No. 13, pp. 516-17. "To the Right Honourable
Alice Countess of Carbery, on her enriching ["at her coming" in Saintsburgy]
into Wales." ca. 1654-55. 46 Formal first approach to "shrine" of Lady
Alice; public panegyric on an educated woman who belonged to an important local family
and could bring art and culture to Wales. Katherine humble yet trying to make
friends.

G. Poems to Celmina - Lady Elizabeth Boyle Tufton, Countess of Thanet. Lady
Elizabeth belonged to the powerful and intellectually-gifted Anglo-Irish Boyle family, two
of whose male-members, Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, and Wentworth Dillon, Earl of
Roscommong were responsible for the staging of Philips's translated play, Pompey,
in the Smock Alley theater in Dublin, Ireland, February 1663.

3. No. 107, p. 594. "To Celimena." November-March 1662-63. Brief passionate poem (four
heroic couplets) which recalls poems of ecstacy to Rosania or to Lucasia. Orinda accosts
her heart, but this time warns it to "forbear" "tormenting" Celimena. Katherine is by now aware
that if she presses too hard on an intimacy, she will be rejected, and her vision shattered once
more.

4. No. 87, pp. 581-82. "To the Countess of Thanet, upon her Marriage", April 1664.
Another forced epithalamion. "Formal and correct rather than
poetical"47

3. No. 89, pp. 582-83. "On the Death of my Lord Rich, Only Son to the Earl of Warwick,
who dy'd of the Small Pox, 1664. Poignant elegy; Katherine could have known the desolated
mother, the literary Lady Mary Boyle Rich,Countess of Warwick, aunt to Celimena and
Valeria.49 An occasion to mourn the uncertainty and ravages of life; she enters
into the parents' anguish; she recalls her step-daughter's death.

I. Poems to Pastora and Phillis - unidentified women from Katherine's later
poetic period (1662-63).

1. Mambretti. "To The Right Honorable The Lady Mary Boteler on her marriage
to my Lord Cavendish." October 1662.50 As yet no ideal name; graceful distant
epithalamion; an occasion to celebrate Lady Cavendish's family. Reprinted by Thomas,
Collected Poems as "To the Lady Mary Butler at her marriage with the Lord
Cavendish, October 1662, I:250.

2. No. 95, p. 587. "To my Lady M. Cavendish, choosing the name of Policrite." 1664. Final
felicitous song of deep content Orinda experienced in intimate converse with a woman friend.
One of the last poems Katherine wrote; "she was never better than in this
vein."15

J (I). Poem to Policrite's father.

1. No. 103, pp. 591-592. "To my Lord Duke of Ormond, upon the late Plot." May
1663.52 Graceful public panegyric in the manner of Orinda's Stuart poems; she
praises Ormond's many virtues, particularly his loyalty to the Stuarts during the
Commonwealth.

K. Poem to Mrs. E. Hering. - unidentified woman.

1. No. 67, pp. 565-66. "In Memory of Mrs.
E.Hering" Elegy which takes the form of an idealized
verse character of a woman who valued private
life and lived within herselfe "thy mind
was to thee both a shelter and retreat."

2. No. 10l. pp. 590-91. "On the death of my first and dearest childe, Hector Philipps, borne
the 23d of Aprill, and dyd'd the 2nd of May 1655. set by Mr Lawes" ["Orinda upon little Hector
Philips" in Saintsbury}. Seven years after marriage death of new-born baby boy, Plangent
elegaic quatrains.

3. No. 88, p. 582. EPITAPH. ON HECTOR PHILIPS ["Epitaph on her Son H.P" in
Saintsbury"]. 1655. Fine in Ben Jonson's manner. Trochaic octosyllabic couplets like the
above. It probably ought to be an anthology favorite.

4. No. 33, p. 535. "To Antenor on a paper of mine wch J.Jones threatens to publish to his
prejudice." 1655. See Lucasia poem, No. B.19 above. Good forceful contemptuous tone;
heroic couplets. Colonel Jones "below a poet's curse; she can only wish "Let him be still himself,
and let him live."

5. No, 94, p. 587. "On the 1. of January, 1657." Her twenty-sixth birthday; she looks back
on her life to observe men in the world destroying themselves for vain-glory.

6. No. 30, pp. 530-31. "In memory of F. P. who dyed at Acton 24 May. 1660 -- 13th of her
age" ("In Memory of F.P. who died at Acton, 24 May, 1660, at Twelve and an Half of Age" in
Saintsburgy)." Consummate elegy (reprinted above).

3. No. 20, pp. 522-23. "To my dear Sister Mrs. C.P. on her nuptialls." 1663.
Katherine's half-sister; child of mother's second marriage called Cassandra, possibly
a poetic name. A sincere epithalamion in which she wishes the couple content in things
of the mind.

III. Self-communing poems.

N. Impersonal poems of renunciation.

1. No. 47, pp. 546-47. "Against Pleasure. Set by Dr. Coleman."
1655. Unusual poem for neoplatonic group because in an incisive only slightly allegorical
style, she insists on disillusion. A tone of rankling bitterness: ""Tis all a cheat."

2. No. 71, p. 569. -12 Cor. V.19. God was in Christ reconciling the World to Himself." Civil
War Period. 8to Aprilis 1653. (King still alive). She resolves to "imitate" God by "enlarging"
her sympathy when all around her are "narrow souls."

3. No. 90, p. 583. "The Virgin." 1650-60. A fragment; unfinished "Character" in the
manner first popularized by Overbury.

4. No. 60 pp. 556-18. "La Grandeur d'esprit" ("A Resvery" in Saintsburgy). Commonwealth.
Ironic bleak discourse (quoted above) which reveals Katherine's pessimistic and sceptical
outlook towards politics and power in public life. "Power and Greatness" are "golden slavery."
She sums up the war thus: "some for Consciencep some for Honour die/And some are meanly
killld they know not why."

5. No. 61, p. 558. "A Countrey Life." Commonwealth. Katherine Philips in Wales writes a
Golden Age poem. She compares the "felicity" of her "solitude', to "vanity" of "the Spring-
Garden show" (a popular Commonwealth pleasure grounds in London).

6. No. 48, pp. 547-48. "God" ("A Prayer" in Saintsbury). Late Commonwealth. She seeks
a conversion experience. There are passages of great beauty in this poem; e.g., the world
is thus described: "Such shaddows are produc'd by the moonebeams/Of Trees or houses, on the
running streams." She prays "that I may heare the God within me speak"/When with a Silent and
retired art/Shall I with all this empty hurry part?"

8. No. 75, p. 574. "Death." 1659-60. She writes of the self-destruction of the
Commonwealth: it died "sadly" "From traitors in their bosom bred." Companion piece to
poem to Antenor against despair and wishing for death (see No. L. 7 above).

9. No. 73, pp. 571-72. "The Soul." After 1660. Descartes-like subtle reasoning on new
popular scepticism towards religion. Shows remarkable learning for woman of her period.

3 No. 24, pp. 525-26. ."To Mr. J.B. the noble Cratander, upon a Composition of his which
he was not willing to own publiquely." 1654-55. Cratander was John Birkenhead, a minor
neoplatic poet.55 Orinda praises his morals and art; she thinks he must publish
"t'uphold the credit and the beauty of the old." She disliked puritan ascetism and iconoclasm.

5. No. 77, pp. 575-78. "An ode upon retirement, made upon ocasion of Mr Cowley's on that
subject ("Upon Abraham Cowley's Retirement Ode" in Saintsbury). 1663. A Pindaric; an
occasion for lyrical expatiation on the value of a private "quiet and a cool retreat" to a "safe and
solid shore."

6. No. 91, pp. 583-84, "Upon the engracing K:P: on a Tree in the short talke at Barn=Elms"
("Upon the Graving of her Name upon a Tree in Barn-Elms Walks" in Saintsbury). 1663. Gently
humorous octosyllabic couplets commemorating a visit she made to Cowley's
retreat.

4. No. 12, pp. 515-16. "To the Noble Palaemon, on his incomparable Discourse on
Friendship." After 1656. Souers doubts Gosse's assumption that Palaemon in this poem is
Jeremy Taylor -- who published a long general discourse on friendship in his "golden" style to
Mrs. Philips. Hiscock found an obscure letter on friendship from Finch (also called Palaemong
see No. Q.1 above) to Lucasia and suggests that Gosse was wrong.59 A
disinterested reading of Orinda's description of an exalted discourse does not preclude Taylor's
essay. She would have been very proud to have had it addressed to her.

V. Stuart poems

R. Poems of the Civil War and Commonwealth.

1. No. Il, P. 515. "On the 3rd of September 1651." Effective poem on tragedy of
war (discussed above).

1. No. 2, pp. 507-8, "On the numerouse accesse of the English to waite upon the
King in Flanders." May 1660. Humorous description of King's sudden magnetic appeal: "So till
thou come we shall unpeopled be."

2. No. 3, pp. 508-9. "Arion on a Dolphin, to his Majestie at his passadge [sic] into England."
May 1660. Idealizing verse character and history of Charles II's travels, hopefully self-fulfilling
(and self-serving) prophecy and praise of his "mercy" extended to all.

3. No. 8, pp. 512-13. "On the death of the Duke of Gloucester." September 1660,
Stilted impersonal poem,

6. No. 4, pp. 509-10. "On the Fair Weather just at the Coronation, it having rained
immediately before and after." April 1660. Light-hearted poem in her best ingenious
manner; sparkling memorable conceit at center of poem is often quoted in secondary histories
of the period.

7. Mambretti, "On the Coronation." April 1660.60 Companion to above poem;
tells story of oak. Thomas prints this in the back of his series of poems, Collected
Works, I, No. 124, p. 249.

9. No. 9, pp. 513-14. "To her royall highnesse, the Duchesse of Yorke, on her command to
send her some things that I had wrote." April 1662. Awkward overdone panegyric.

10. No. 5, pp. 509-11. "To the Queene on her arrivall at Portsmouth. May. 1662" ("To
Queen's Majesty on her Arrival at Portsmouth, May 14, 1662" in Saintsbury). Sometimes forced,
but includes passages of real lyric grace.

11. No. 76, Pp. 574-75. "To Queen's Majesty, on her late Sickness and Recovery."
Much like the above, with the difference that this is a poem in praise of Charles II,
making known his real distress at his Portuguese queen's sudden frightening seizure.

12. No. 116, pp. 600-1. "To His Grace Gilbert, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, June 10,
1664." Her last poem (discussed above). An important man in Stuart society, they
had a mutual friend in Jeremy Taylor.61

I On William Cartwright as a "cherished" Cavalier playwright, see Alfred
Harbage, Cavalier Drama (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1936), pp. 141-44. See
also John
Broadbent,ed., Poets of the 17th Century, 2 vols. (New York: Signet, 1974). II, 264-
69. Broadbent's two-volume anthology remains one of the best ever made of 17th century
poetry.

2 George Saintsbury, ed., Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, 3
vols. (Londont Oxford University Press, 1905), III, 487-612. Saintsbury improved on Cotterell
by numbering Philips's poems. For the convenience of the reader I cited both numbers and
pages of the poems in my text; Thomas used Saintsbury's numbers.

3 This phrase is Philips's for the papers that had escaped her; see her letter to
Poliarchus dated January 29, 1663/4 (included by Cotterell as a "Preface', in his edition).
Saintsbury, III, 491.

4 See. for example, Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men:
Romantic Love and Friendship between Women from the Renaissance to the Present
(New York: William Morrow, 1981), p. 69.

17 See Betty Travitsky, ed. The Paradise of Women Writings:
Englishwomen of the Renaissance (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981), pp. 13t 115-
17, 216 (onJoanna Lumley, Lady Fitzalan's and Lady Mary Sidney Herbert, the Countess of
Pembroke's translated plays). It is a great shame this book reprints so many women in such
small porportions so that effect often is to have many disconnected scraps which exemplify
rather than explode a number of stereotypes. It is very useful as a bibliography.

18 The "golden age" of romantic friendship" between learned women was the
eighteenth century; Orinda was a new phenomenon in the mid-seventeenth; see Faderman,
pp. 75-143o See also Gosse, "The Matchless Orinda," pp. 208-ll, 214.

21 See Broadbent's comments, II:317; also Souers, who attributes her misery
wholly to her husband's fall from power; Souers, pp. 105-99.

22 Thomas, p. 100.

23 Souers, p. 98. See also pp. 89-92. Katherine had a second daughter of her
ownt,another Katherine, whom Gosse thought was called Joan, and to whom he wrongly
attributed the poems of Ephelia (still unidentified). Despite Souers, the attribution is still made.
See Gosse, "The Matchless Orinda," pp. 228-29; Reynolds, pp. 138-39; and Stanford, pp. 66-7.

24 Souers, pp. 89-91. Another extremely affectionate mother of the period was
Alice Thornton. See The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton, ed. Charles
Jackson (Yorks Surtees Society, 1873), pp. 91-3. 96-8, 107ff., et passim. We do not
know about the average woman's love for her children because she could not write; see Antonia
Fraser, The Weaker Vessel (New York: Knopf, 1984), pp. 73ff.

25 It would not be inappropriate to place Katherine's translation of St. Amant's
"La Solitude" with these poems as it is self-communing, and it rehearses in a more fanciful or
symbolic mode than is usual with Orinda the same retreat from society. On the symbolism of
this poem, see J. P. Hill and E. Caracciolo-Trejo, Baroque Poetry (London: Dent,
1975), pp. 1-4, 33-419 46-60.

26 Souers, pp. 270-71.

27 Ibid., p. 70.

28 Mahl and Koon are the single exception. They reprint "To Mr. Henry
Vaughang Silurist, on his Poems" and "To Mr, Henry Lawes" in lieu of the usual Lucasia and
Rosania poems. They also reprint Orinda's letter of January 29, 1663/4 to Poliarchus; it is an
apology
for her poetry. See pp. 16off.

29 On the pseudoknowledge and pejorative categories with which modern
psychoanalysis has burdened female friendships, see Faderman, pp. 15-209 239ff. Broadbent
accuses Orinda of "bitchery" in her lesbianismo" II::317. Feminist scholars also select Orinda's
love poems, valuing her because she offered "female love, affection and friendship a concrete
and expressive literary shape"; see Moira Fergussson, ed., The First Feminists: British
Women Writers, 1578-1799 (Bloomingtoni Indiana Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 104-13.

31 See Hilda L. Smith, Reason's Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English
Feminists (Urbana: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 20-66, 75-95, Aphra Johnson
Behn was also "incomparable in this period and for some of the same reasons as Philips. On
Behn's education.,see Angeline Goreau, Reconstructing Aphra (New York: Dial,
1980), pp. 24-32.

32 I correct the Cotterell-Saintsbury text (whichread,"Leon's" hill) by an early
suviving manuscript; see Thomas, p. 98.

33 Smith's denigrating discussion is typical, pp. 153-54. One should note that
in Smith's really superior book, one finds the common error of identifying Policrite with Margaret
Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcaste. Souers and Mambretti argue that Policrite was Lady
Mary Butler Cavendish, the Duke of Ormonde's daughter. Like the identification of Ephelia with
Katherine Philips's daughter. this fiction of a friendship between Orinda and the Duchess is found
in a number of books on the seventeenth century, including a good contemporary biography of
the Duchess of Newcastle, Douglas Grant's Margaret the First (Toronto: Univ. of
Toronto Press, 195?). pp. 216-17. Another whipping girl use of Orinda can be found in
Nancy Cotton, Women Playwrights in England, c. 1361-1750 (Lewisburg: Bucknell
Univ. Press. 1980), pp. 195-98 especially.

34 Souers, p. 50.

35 Ibid., p. 256. Souers argues that Philips was Cartwright's disciple, but
although she takes two poetic names from Cartwright's plays, she is also influenced by a large
circle of seventeenth-century male and female English and French poets.

41 Ibid., p. 109. Souers writes: "For seventy lines she displays the
convulsions of her disappointed heart in couplets overflowing with emotion more real and
spontaneous and passionate than any of the other poems of this time."

42 Ibid., p. 135.

43 Elmen, p. 56.

44 Souers, p. 34.

45 Ibid., p. 45.

46 Gosse, Jeremv Taylor, p. 127.

47 Souers, p. 243.

48 Ibid., p. 163.

49 Charlotte Fell Smith reprints much of the diary of this interesting educated
court lady in Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, 1625-7: Her Family and Friends
(London: 1901).

50 Mambretti, pp. 447-48.

51 Souers, p. 244.

52 Ibid., p. 160.

53 Ibid., p. 18.

54 Denham's use of the stag to represent Thomas Wentworth, the first Earl of
Strafford was well known; but Orinda's more generalized allegory and humanizing of the animals
of the hunt rather resembles the Duchess's poem, of which, among others, Waller was notably
jealous. See Margaret Lucas Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Poems and
Fancies (1653; rpt. Yorkshire: Scholar Press, 1972), pp. 110-16.

To be added after close of foonotes (this was printed in Philological Quarterly:
Addendum written in 1987:

Since I wrote this essay, in her "Two Poems and A Prose Receipt: The Unpublished
Juvenalia of Katherine Philips," ELR, 16 (1985), 383-90, Claudia Limbert printed two
more "new" (Iiitherto unknown) poems by Philips, ca. 1646-48. In these an unmarried "C.Fowler"
writes to her neighbor, an unmarried Welshwoman, Mrs. Anne Barlow. These poems form
a new subgroup in my first group, and they should be placed between D and E, between the
Ardelia and Philoclea poems. Limbert states that after she found the poems in the uncatalogued
Orielton Collection of the National Library of Wales,she found that she had been anticipated by
Ronald Lockley, Orielton: The Human and Natural History of a Welsh Manor
(London, 1977), pp. 19-20, and by an unpublished Ph.D. dissertation by Patrick Thomas, "An
Edition of the Poems and -Letters of Katherine Philips, 1632-1664," Diss. Univ. of Wales, 1982.
However, Limbert is the first to identify Philoclea by means of Philips's copybook, NLW 775B, p.
37," as another unmarried Welshwoman, Mrs Mallet Stedman whose sister-in-law married
Katlierine's husband's brother.

The above is the original version of the essay as corrected by comparing titles and lines and
whole texts against Patrick Thomas's edition of Katherine's works, for since I wrote this essay
and it was published Patrick Thomas published his findings and dissertation in the form of a two
volume edition of Katherine's works, The Collected Works of Katherine Philips: The
Matchless Orinda, 2 vols., edited with notes and Textual Commentary (London: Stump
Cross Books, 1990). Stump Cross Books is the label Germaine Greer has given her London
Press so this is a Germaine Greer product. Unfortunately, Thomas chooses to follow the
numbering and disorder of Cotterell and (after him) Saintsbury. Thus when he finds new poems
he simply adds them on at the end. Where I picked up some of the poems that were not in
Cotterell by 1987 I have placed them in my ordering with Thomas's pagination next to the item;
those poems not included by me but which can be found in Thomas are as follows;

Thomas's Nos. 141, Vol I, pp. 241-42: "To the Right Honourable the Countess of Cork". This
is second poem to H (1), No 1 above; it can be profitably read alongside "To the Rt Hono: the
Lady E. C. ("Madam, I do not write to you that men may know/How much I'm honour'd that I may
do so"). The Countess was (as stated above) mother to Celimena (Lady Elizabeth Boyle Tufton,
Countess of Thanet) and Valeria (Lady Anne Boyle Montagu, later Lady Sandwich) and she
encouraged Katherine to write poetry. Hence the real warmth, gratitude and length of this
epistle.

Thomas's Nos. 118 through 122, Vol I, pp. 242-251, are comprised of original Songs from
Katherine's translation of Corneille's Pompey: Song from Pompey, Act
I: "Since affairs of the State are already decreed ..."; Act II: "See how Victorious
Caesar's Pride; Act III: "From lasting and unclouded Day"; Act IV: "Proud
Monuments of Royal Dust!"; Act V: "Ascend a Throne, Great Queen! to you ..."

Thomas's No. 127, Vol I, pp. 253-53, "Juliana and Amaranta, a Dialogue" is another poem to
women friends which would presumably go with Katherine's poems to "minor" women, women
who were only passing not intensely important friends to her.

Thomas's No. 128, "On Argalus his vindication to Rosania, is a short poem which belongs to
the set to Rosania (Mrs Mary Aubrey Montagu). Again Katherine has recourse to names from
Philip Sidney's Arcadia.

Thomas's No. 129 , "No blooming youth" is the first of two poems labelled "Juvenilia."

Thomas's No. 130, "A marry'd state" is the second of two poems labelled "Juvenilia". Here
we find Katherine inveighing against the married state. As this is uncommon in print with her, I
reprint it here:

"A marryd state affords but little ease:
The best of husbands are so hard to please.
This in wifes Carefull faces you may spell,
Tho they desemble [sic] their misfortunes well.
A virgin state is crown'd with much content,
It's allways happy as it's innocent.
No Blustering husbands to create your fears,
No pangs of child birth to extort your tears,
No children's crys for to offend your ears,
Few worldly crosses to distract your prayers.
Thus are you freed from all the cares that do
Attend on matrymony and a husband too.
Therefore, madam, be advised by me:
Turn, turn apostate to Love's Levity.
Supress wild nature if she dare rebell,
There' s no such thing as leading Apres in Hell.

Thomas's Nos. 131 - 133 are printed as "poems of doubtful authenticity." I have printed the
first, Thomas's No. 131, Vol I, pp. 254-56, as by Katherine, see above No.B13, which I took from
Mahl and Koon, "To Rosania & Lucasia. Articles of Friendship.

Thomas's No. 132, Vol I, pp. 256-57, "Upon his Majesties most happy restauration to his
Royall Throne in Brittaine," "Awake Brtiiannia, rouse thy selfe, and say". If this is by Katherine, it
belongs with the Stuart poems.

Thomas's No. 133, "Upon the Hollow Tree unto which his Majestie escaped after the
unfortunate Battell at Worcester", "Haile aged Tree! Jove keep thee from all harmes ...". This is
another Stuart poem. Doubtless Cotterell would have put it early in the arrangement had he
know of the text.

Brief Updated Bibliography

Claudia Limbert also submitted an important essay to Philological Quarterly,
"The Poetry of Katherine Philips: Holographs, Manuscripts,and Early Printed Texts" which I read
as one of its reviewers and strongly recommended for publication in the periodical. It was
subsequently published by PQ. The reader today must also read the essays and
commentary on Katherine Philips particularly as published by Carol Barash in her English Women's
Poetry, 1649-1714: Politics Community, and Linguistic Authority (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1996); by Isobel Grundy and Susan Wiseman, edd., Women, Writing,
and History, 1640-1720 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992); and Margaret J. M.
Ezell's study, Writing Women's Literary History. Baltimore and London: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1993. There have been other smaller pieces and commentary on Philips and the women
poets of her era in various books, and there are some older ones which are not cited above (Dorothea Canfield Fisher,
Corneille and Racine in England [New York: Macmillan, 1940]). These include Lucy Brashear, "The Forgotten Legacy of the 'Matchless Orinda,'" Anglo-Welch Review, 65 (1979), pp. 68-76; Harriette Andreadis, "The Sapphic-Platonics of Katherine Philips, 1632-1664," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 15:11 (1989), 34-60; . However,the above three books
are the most important recent ones and themselves contain excellent bibliographies.